BACCANALS. – The name of a cult celebrated in Rome (Livy, XXXIX, 8 ff.), in the grove of Stimula (Livy XXXIX, 12, 4; cf. CIL, VI, 9897; Schol. ad Juv., 2, 3), on the slopes of the Aventine (Ovid, Fasti, VI, 518), or in other places in Italy, especially in the south (cf. CIL, I, 196 = CIL, X, 104; Livy, XXXIX, 41; XL, 19, 9), at the beginning of the 2nd century BCE.
The deity at the center of the celebrations was Bacchus (Dionysus; [v.]). However, not in the form, known to the Latins from very ancient times, of Liber Pater, god, together with Libera, of fertility, and who, from the beginning of the Republic, had formed, together with Libera and Ceres, a triad analogous to the Greek one of Demeter, Dionysus, and Kore, but rather in the form that had found its place in the mystery cults (v. Dionysus, Mysteries of). This type of religiosity came from southern Italy; originally the cult was reserved for women (Livy, XXXIX, 13, 8), then, through a Campanian priestess, men were also introduced. (Elsewhere [XXXIX, 8, 3] Livy speaks of an «ignobilis Graecus» who brought the Bacchanalia from southern Italy to Rome through Etruria). The festivals were secret; they probably involved the representation of the killing of the child Dionysus by the Titans, a ritual death («ita ut ne corpora quidem interdum ad sepulturam exstarent») and a kind of mystical rapture among the gods («raptos a dis homines dici»: Livy, XXXIX, 13, 13).
In essence, it was a cult of an Eastern type, centered on the figure of Dionysus, a cult that had had a great moment at the court of Ptolemy Philopator in Egypt, of a mystical, orgiastic, and esoteric character, to which, perhaps, the philosophical-religious speculations of the Pythagoreans were not unrelated. In Rome, the Bacchanalia, made public through denunciation motivated by private matters, were severely considered by the Senate—always hostile to any form of «externa religio»—which, through the consul Postumius Albinus, mounted a veritable political affair that ended in a bloody repression following the well-known «senatus consultum» of 186. This, while not arriving at a precise prohibition, regulated, by greatly limiting them, the celebrations of the Bacchanalia (the text of the «senatus consultum»—preserved in CIL, VI, 9897—was found «in agro Teurano», in Calabria).
The singular historical significance of the Bacchanalia episode lies in the fact that the event represents, as far as is known, the first case on Italian soil of a collision between political and religious power (the investigations into the Bacchanalia were conducted by the consul and not by the priestly college).
To justify the sanctions, Livy’s account is larded with scandalous details and accusations of immorality, the same accusations that would later be leveled against Christians.
After the persecution of 186, it is necessary to go as far as the middle of the 1st century BCE to find mention again of the Bacchanalia (Serv. ad Verg., Ecl., 5, 29: «Caesarem constat primum sacra Liberi patris transtulisse Romam»). Caesar, who, according to all likelihood, had learned the Dionysian cults in Alexandria in Egypt, reintroduced them to Rome. After him, with the progressive admission of foreign religious forms and religious syncretism during the Empire, such cults persisted.